


the holding of hands (the breaking of glass)

by heartofwinterfell



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Firsts, Post-Season/Series 02, all the other characters are mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-26
Updated: 2019-03-26
Packaged: 2019-12-18 05:04:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18242924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofwinterfell/pseuds/heartofwinterfell
Summary: She’s fairly certain normal teenagers go on a first date before they go to battle with bloodthirsty monsters and corrupt government labs.[nancy, jonathan, and a series of firsts]





	the holding of hands (the breaking of glass)

_[date]_

 

They’ve got it all upside down.

She’s fairly certain normal teenagers go on a first date before they go to battle with bloodthirsty monsters and corrupt government labs.

Nancy’s had just about enough of caring about being a normal teenager.

That somehow does not stop her from spending thirty minutes scouring her closet for the right skirt to go with the right top to match the right shoes or taking another thirty minutes after that to stand before her vanity fussing with her hair and fiddling with a tube of lipstick, wondering if she’ll feel ridiculous the moment after she applies it.

It’s the perfect shade of rose. She and Barb picked it.

Mike banging on the door stops her from drifting too far. “Will’s here, so Jonathan’s here, so you can go on your _date_.” His inflection is just high-pitched enough to be annoying, which makes Nancy smile. She’ll be sure to tease him later about Dungeons and Dragons and eggos and a girl who lives out in the woods.

For now, she tries not to take the steps two at a time or race too quickly out the door.

He has the passenger side open for her already while looking two seconds away from bolting, which is how she knows he has the same fluttering butterflies in his stomach as she does. This is going to be one of the strangest nights of her life and she helped assemble a sensory deprivation tank in a middle school gymnasium.

How do you first date someone who has a matching scar up the length of his palm?

Nancy has no answer when she slides into the passenger seat of a car that has driven her miles away from home to track down a conspiracy theorist.

He must not either because when she asks where they were going, he replies, “I have no idea.”

Nancy laughs so hard the butterflies fly away.

“I guess we’ll just have to figure it out together.”

They end up picking up enough ice cream to feed a small army and disperse amongst the kids who seem to live in the Wheeler basement and watch a B-horror movie while listening to said kids squabble over what to do in their latest campaign. Something about stealing magic beans or defeating a champion knight with one arm. It makes her smile as much as the cheesy horror effects and the way Jonathan’s shoulder feels pressed up against hers.

 

_[hands]_

 

They’ll brush shoulders in the hallways as they walk side by side and she’ll shoot scathing looks at the kids who baulk at seeing them in each other’s orbit. She’ll sit on the sliver of space on the dark room table as he develops his photos and his hand will skim her knee, her foot will tap his calf. But he never leans over her at the lockers to steal a kiss and she never wraps her arms around his waist before they separate for class.

It seems silly, just wasted and meaningless intimacy.

Only then she gets overwhelmed with the need to brush the fringe that kisses the tips of his eyelashes and sometimes she catches him staring at her hand like its a precious but unreachable thing.

On date number four, they’re walking out of a trashy comedy, middling amongst the other couples strolling to their cars, and Nancy reaches out and slips her hand into his. As simple as that. She even swings the hands between them as they meander the rest of the way to Jonathan’s car.

It only occurs to her after he’s dropped her off with one kiss to her forehead and one kiss to her lips that it was the first time they held hands without the world being in jeopardy.

 

_[dance]_

 

They take separate cars. He drives with his mother and Will. She takes a paradoxically jittery and moping Mike. There’s no grand entrance, no spotlight that falls on her when she enters in her red plaid dress, no moment where the sea of young teens part and he emerges to ask her for this one slow, slow dance.

There’s not even a second to steal for themselves, not in that first hour. She has chaperones fretting over the punch, worrying that she pours too much or too little. He is the singular photographer and there’s a line for photos snaking against the bleachers. She hears more from Mike and his friends than she does from him.

It takes ducking away when one of the mother’s back is turned for Nancy to finally cross the divide.

“Having fun?”

A smile tugs at the corners of his lips as he snaps a photo of four giggling girls. “I think I might be getting high off of too much cologne.”

Nancy feels her own smiling blooming as she takes a careful step forward. “Think you’ll be okay enough to save me a dance?”

The camera flashes again, not nearly as bright as the shy smile he flashes her. “If they ever let me leave.”

They don’t. Jonathan stays locked behind his camera and Nancy spends her dance with Dustin. It’s nothing close to a loss. As she steals another smile across the gym at him, Nancy thinks that this may be the greatest school dance she’s ever been to. She makes a note to herself to ask Jonathan if they can skip out on prom.

Something tells her it won’t take much convincing.

 

_[photo]_

 

The lights are coming up and the kids are filtering out. She helps a mother stack up sticky punch bowls, occasionally stopping to push her hair out of her eyes before ditching the hairstyle altogether. Soon the heels are off too and the last song hits a final crescendo. It feels like the end of a movie that’s not hers, though she thinks she knows whose perfect ending this is when her eyes find Mike twirling El on a dance floor that’s all their own.

Her smile drifts to the half-disassembled photo stand, only the work of dismantling has come to a halt. Will and Joyce have huddled around Jonathan, whose hands fiddle around his camera until Joyce snatches it up. She’s saying something to him, soft and encouraging, and then suddenly all Byers eyes are on her.

Her eyes snap back over to punch bowls and gossiping mothers, but she knows someone is coming towards her. Second later, there’s a light hand at her elbow. Jonathan’s eyes are on his feet when she turns to him.

“My mom wants us to take a picture together.”

Joyce is watching them and the soft encouragement radiating off of her warms Nancy down to the tips of her toes.

“You want to take a picture with me?” Nancy asks and she’s only a little teasing.

“My _mom_ wants us to a take a picture together,” he repeats, but he’s looking at her now and his flushed cheeks makes Nancy’s heart thud a little faster.

“Oh well, if _she_ insists.”

She tucks her hand into the crook of his arm and drags him back to his waiting family, even as he never resists. Will ends up taking the photo, Dustin saddling up behind him to comment on the right angles.

Her makeup is smudged and her shoes are across the gymnasium. His hair’s a mess and his jacket’s gone. And it makes her feel a little like a lovesick school girl that the second after the camera shutters, she thinks about where she wants to hang the photo on her wall. She’s still not embarrassed for a second when she asks him for a copy. The smile like a sunrise that lights up his face makes it impossible to be.

 

_[holiday]_

 

They spend New Year’s at Hopper’s cabin because El has never seen the ball drop and everyone wants to celebrate that they survived the year.

El’s transfixed by the fuzzy technicolor images of Times Square and Mike’s transfixed by El. Joyce and Hopper have designated the kitchen as a place for adult conversation, hushed words spoken but at times punctuated by Hopper’s hearty laugh. Their eyes never wander far from their children. Dustin and Lucas are arguing over a movie, or maybe a comic, or maybe nothing at all, and Max chimes in every once and awhile just to make sure the pot stays stirred.

Will’s nearby, always a welcome part of the conversation, but he brought his art supplies and the space around him is an ever growing spread of pencils as multi-colored as the images on the TV. At one point, Steve sits beside him and asks to see his progress. The way Steve smiles, so soft and a touch awestruck, lets Nancy know he’s as much a part of Will’s drawing as every other person in the room. And that makes Nancy smile. It makes Jonathan smile, too.

Everyone crowds around the couch when it’s time to countdown to midnight and their voice grow so loud when they reach ten, night, eight that the whole cabin shakes.

They don’t kiss when the clock strikes and the ball drops. Jonathan gets a smacking kiss on the cheek from Joyce and Nancy squeezes Mike until he bats her away.

There’s enough time later to find a moonlit corner of the porch to ring in the year to come.

 

_[night]_

 

Waking up from a nightmare never happens like it does in the movies. Not for her. There’s no thrashing, no screaming, no shooting up in the bed, gasping for breath, the phantom pains of what passed still felt deep in her bones. The only pain that ever remained is felt in her heart.

Her eyes blink open, the fear and horror and grief so fresh it’s as though they have her heart in a vice grip. It makes it hard to recall her list, the collection of things she has to tell herself to make the goosebumps go away.

Mike is alive. Will is alive. Steve is alive. Dustin, Lucas, Hopper, Joyce, Eleven, Max, they’re all alive. Jonathan is -

An arm tightens around her waist, but not too tight. Lips ghost over her shoulder. “Okay?”

In the swirl of demon dogs and overheating rooms and too much blood, she never stopped to take stock of her surroundings. These are not her bedroom walls nor is she huddled under her own bed blanket. She vaguely remembers hours earlier, scaling down the side of her house, feeling just a bit like a ninja. She had Jonathan park a quarter of a mile down the street, even though she knew despite years of friendship between Mike and Will, her parents would never recognize the Byers’ car.

The memories flood back but she has no real use for them. Jonathan kisses her shoulder again and Nancy somehow finds it in her to smile. This is what she needs. “Okay.”

It’s the first night they’ve spent together since their roadtrip, the first night they’ve spent together since they knew this is for real. As she drifts off to sleep, Nancy thinks that’ll they both have to start getting better at climbing in and out of her bedroom window.

 

_[morning]_

 

She forgets where she is again early the next morning and only remember again when she stumbles out of the bedroom still half asleep and comes face to face with Joyce Byers sitting at the kitchen table. Nancy opens her mouth, ready with the flood of excuses she has delivered to her own mother over the years, but closes it when she sees Joyce does not look surprised to see her.

All she does is smile at Nancy over the lip of her coffee mug and say, “Sorry, there’s not breakfast yet. Jonathan likes to make it.”

Nancy nods like that’s something she knows about Jonathan, only to realize instantly that it is something she knows about Jonathan. She knows because he picked her up late for school a week in late January because he had been teaching Will to make eggs sunny side up and Will burned the first try, so they had to start all over. Nancy remembers smiling at the story like she’s smiling now and it makes her feel comfortable enough to say, “I’ll go see if he’s ready to make it for us.”

Us, us, us. That word follows Nancy as she drifts back into Jonathan’s room. He’s burrowed under the covers to avoid the sunshine in his eyes and Nancy takes a moment to stand in the doorway he wears the morning - a little messy but soft and quiet and utterly Jonathan.

She wants to keep waking him up in the morning to make breakfast for her and his family.

By whacking him with a pillow and letting her hair tickle his cheeks and saying a little too loud in his ears, “We’re all hungry out here.”

 

_[fight]_

 

“Why do you even care if I go or not?”

“Because Annie invited both of us. She thinks we’re coming together.”

“Why does that matter? I’m already the guy that hates parties. She probably won’t even notice I’m not there.”

“That’s not the point!”

“Then what is the point?”

“Can’t we just have one night where we go to a stupid party?”

“Because the last time you went to a stupid party was so great, right?”

She slams her bedroom door in his face and refuses to cry when she hears his car pulling away. Her mom knocks on the door later and asks if she needs a glass of water or food or a shoulder to cry on. Nancy ignores her.

Somehow she ends up sitting cross legged on the floor in front of her closet, holding the white sweater stained punch red, wondering why she ever kept it in the first place. Is it really so hard to throw away bad memories?

She trashes the sweater and sneaks downstairs to steal of box a cookies and scarfs them down in bed and does not cry. She tries not to think that the only reason she doesn’t is because she forces herself not to.

 

_[make-up]_

 

They’re in her - Mike’s - basement of all places, sitting on the couch one cushion a part. He’s wringing his hands like he does when he wants to say something, something important, but he can’t assemble the words right. She wonders if Mike and Will are waiting, listening, at the top of the stairs. Just as she starts thinking they don’t care, the top stair creaks. Of course they do; she’d care if Mike and El or Mike and Will or any pair of them spent three going on four days not speaking.

She breaks the silence.

“Sometimes I do still just want a night where I can forget.”

He shuffles over, a fraction of an inch.

“Me too.”

Nancy bites her lip, the tears cresting. “Barb hated parties like that too.”

Jonathan crosses the rest of the distance, offering his shoulder. Distantly, she hears another creak, a door slowly closing shut.

It’s not better instantly. But they only needed a place to start.

 

_[dance ii]_

 

The stars shine brighter in the Byers’ backyard. She can never recall bearing witness to such a bright, beautiful sky on her sleepy old cul-de-sac.

It’s hard to focus on just the stars glittering above them and the quiet hum of nature playing second chair to the music flowing from the stereo in his bedroom when Jonathan has one arm wrapped around her shoulders, fingers dancing in her hair and he’s singing along softly to the Cars, with a wavering voice that he finds embarrassing but Nancy thinks is one of the sweetest sounds she’s ever heard.

The song fades out and his voice with it. For a few brief seconds, it’s just the music of the woods and their twin heartbeats.

Then stereo bursts with the first beats of the next song and Nancy murmurs, “I love this song.”

To her surprise, Jonathan shifts to sit up, holding out a hand to her. She takes it without hesitation. “I think I still owe you a dance.”

Nancy laughs as he pulls her to her feet, falling into him as he falls into her. And it’s no slow dance - she bounces on her toes and he thrashes his head and they both spin each other until they’re breathless and shouting the wrong lyrics into the night. But it ends with his arms wrapped tight around her waist and her arms draped around his neck and a kiss that leaves them breathless all over again.

It ends with “and all I want is you.”

 

_[parents]_

 

“So John, what do you have planned for after you graduate high school?”

Nancy does not hide her scowl as her mother has to lean over and remind her father of Jonathan’s name for the second time that night.

For his part, Jonathan does his best to not look like he’d rather be swallowed into the upside down than sitting in the Wheeler’s dining room in his nicest suit playing polite with a man who has seen him at least once a week for the last six years and never bothered to learn his name.

“I’m planning on applying to New York University early decision.”

Nancy notices he does not mention what he wants to study. Her heart aches for him.

“That’s pretty far from home, son.”

She watches him swallow, think through his next words. “I guess...I guess I want to see what else is out there. You know, outside of Indiana.”

Wrong answer. Ted Wheeler’s lip purse down at his chicken and Karen Wheeler shifts uncomfortably in her chair, fork dragging across the bottom of her plate. Nancy feels the desire to fight, lash out at them, bubbling up inside her, only growing strong as she sees Jonathan preparing to apologize.

It’s Mike who swoops in to play bomb diffuser. “I think I want to apply to schools in Boston. Like MIT.”

Their father scoffs at that, launching into a tirade on poor New England values, but it turns the heat off of Jonathan.

Later, when the dishes are cleared away and Ted, tired from his diatribe, is passed out in his recliner, Nancy lingers in the front doorway, not wanting to say goodbye.

“This wasn’t a very good idea,” she admits, trying to spin it with a smile.

“They hate me.”

Nancy shakes her head, so close to saying _they don’t_ , when she realizes she’d rather say, “It wouldn’t matter if they did.”

That doesn’t make him smile. Closing the front door behind her, grabbing his hand, and pulling him towards the car does.

They’re halfway to his house when Jonathan says, “Now they really do hate me.”

“Still doesn’t matter.”

Only she would have rather said, _still doesn’t matter because I love you._

 

_[i love you]_

 

It’s supposed to be shouted at the end of the world.

Nancy’s had just about enough of the end of the world.

“Hey -”

They’re sitting on the porch steps of Hopper’s cabin playing babysitter but neither mind. It’s starting to get hot, though never as hot as his cabin was that night, and she’s holding a dripping soda against her knee, listening to five kids yelling about who’s cheating how at a game of tag.

“Yeah?”

One of them is implementing a no powers rule. She absorbs that without batting an eye. It’s all part of her crazy, messy, utterly normal life.

“I love you.”

They’re not even touching. It’s somehow the most intimate and easy thing they’ve ever done.

“I love you, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was born out of the realization we're skipping a lot of prime nancy/jonathan relationship time with the jump to summer. And knowing the Duffers, they might not even still be together when S3 begins.
> 
> Prove me wrong, Duffers! Prove me wrong!
> 
> And as always, thank you for reading!


End file.
